Foxconn has allowed a journalist to film inside an Apple iPad factory in Shenzen, revealing a fresh-faced workforce.
The resulting three-minute video shows young Chinese employees at the quarter-of-a-million-strong factory filing into work at 7am, fitting motherboards into cases on clean, brightly lit assembly lines and playing …

Re: One of the best places to work?

Re: "More Apple propaganda"...

@Aaron Em

Propaganda is propaganda and should be attacked wherever it appears. Like greenwashing, astroturfing etc. Is Apple the worst? Probably not, but that does not make the mistreatment of workers by their sub-contractor OK.

"Hey, we're less oppressive than the others!" is not a sign of quality or progress.

An why AC? Meh, seemed like a good idea as I kinda figured the Apple Cops would come out of the woodwork.

"Attacked wherever it appears"

Re: One of the best places to work?

Re: One of the best places to work?

Another tiresome leftist trope that started as a little lie and has become a big Lie. Of course their are suicides at Foxconn -- it's the equivalent of a small American city! The suicide RATE however is actually lower than for China in general, and comparable to most other countries.

This has been known for a long time, but truth never got in the way of a leftist meme before, so why should it now, right?

Re: One of the best places to work?

Re: One of the best places to work?

U Fule,

It may be one of the best places to work in China, but by our western standards it may only be one step removed from slavery. All these thing tend to be relative.

Many years ago I worked in a heavy engineering company and a television crew were due to film part of a documentary in our company. Everyone who worked in or had reason to visit any of the workshop floor were issued with hard hats, hi-viz jackets, tradespeople were give new overalls and the whole place was cleaned and painted. Within 3 months things were “back to normal”

So do you think I have any faith in anything that comes out of “official” china?

Re: One of the best places to work?

I am also skeptical about any scheduled filming showing reality. One place I worked had a film crew come in as part of a documentary: The day they came in, everyone was at their desk, smartly dressed, polite, well behaved and working hard. Well, except the guy who had just come back off holiday and didn't know about the filming. He was sent off site on some spurious errand instead.

Any other day, most of the desks would have been vacant, and staff would be dressed casually, work would have been done, but not in the well behaved, focused manner portrayed for camera.

No, the upper management did not orchestrate this: They simply warned people of the filming schedule. Mostly it was the supervisors, instead.

Timmy

Re: Timmy

Hmm, that causes me to think

A factory with 250,000 predominantly young male workers in the UK (hah, dream on) would see a significant number of suicides too. I woder how many staff they lose in RTAs.

I know when my father was a pilot for British Airways they lost more flight staff in road accidents than in plane accidents. Sadly the same wasn't true when he was an Australian NAvy pilot before that, but that's another story...

No doubt it will surprise some

to learn, after my comments in the thread about that Java exploit that everybody but Apple fixed months ago, that I have no problem at all with Apple's contracting manufacturing work out to Foxconn, or with Foxconn's treatment of its workers.

In this it appears I agree with many of those workers themselves -- not just those featured in the video linked from the article, either; those claiming that the suicides of Foxconn workers point out some kind of problem, for example, need to explain why it is that a suicide rate, which is actually much lower at a given company than for the surrounding population, is a sign that that company has a problem -- rather than that they are treating their workers rather better than is the local standard. (Note that the suicide rate didn't decrease at Foxconn after the much-derided installation of nets around the stairwells; it was already below the local average.)

comrade stalin used to post videos like this online of ruddy faced, smiling kolkhozniks. it was called agitprop then and it's called agitprop now. lucky for apple's image that americans don't really get an education, so they wouldn't really know.

@llewton

Don't blame us as a whole! Our pseudo-communist overlords have taken our educational system from a place that taught facts and critical thinking to a place where everyone gets a gold star and a good brainwashing.

@ Figgus

Unfortunately, you undermine your own argument by showing that you have no idea what "communist" means. It may come as a shock, but there is no way that any part of the US administration (either federal or state) can be even vaguely referred to as "communist" (or "pseudo-communist", whatever that means).

Ensuring that all people have good health-care provision, a guaranteed safety-net from absolute poverty, and centrally-funded welfare programmes is NOT communism, despite what you have been told - it is actually the bare minimum that any country that calls itself civilised does for its inhabitants. The benefits to society far outweigh the costs.

Re: Not agitprop in fact

No, it is. agitprop is political propaganda disseminated through literature, film, etc. Especially Communist propaganda, and anything that can be construed as not showing crApple as the greatest company in the world certainly agitates the fanbois.

Re: @ Intractable Potsherd

a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

2.

(often initial capital letter) a system of social organization in which all economic and social activity is controlled by a totalitarian state dominated by a single and self-perpetuating political party.

Treating private property and funds as assets to be seized and redistributed would certainly fall under the first definition, and our latest foray into picking winners and losers in the market (well, trying to anyway) would surely cover the second definition. Perhaps a better word would have been socialist, but I don't shy from communist when the actions match the word. The very actions of many from our current administration follow those definitions, so I'm going to call it as I see it. The very notion of "equal outcomes" instead of "equal opportunity" is communist in nature.

As far as all the stuff all "good" countries do, it's all well and good until handouts replace jobs and a nanny state replaces personal responsibility. That is already occurring over here, and frankly we need LESS of that sort of thing, not more of it. I'm not saying we need to yank the safety net out from under grandma! Quite the opposite: she paid in her whole life, and that obligation needs to be honored. However, that 22 year old mother of 6 who dropped out of school to have kids knowing full well that she'd be taken care of has GOT to stop, and the only way to stop it is to make people deal with the consequences of their actions. The notion that her neighbor's paycheck partly belongs to her as well is very communistic (see definition 1).

Corporations fail, businesses fail, people fail, students fail. The government needs to get out of the way and let them fail, because without the risk of failure there can be no success. We have a malaise from the top down in this country, and the current schooling is trying to establish it from the bottom up.

Thumbs down back to you, simply because denying reality in the name of political correctness is a sure-fire path to failure.

Re: Average Age?

It's a clumsy phrase, but it is the way the word 'average' is used by lay-people who don't know (or care) about the mathematical definitions of the word. In context, I took this to mean that most of the workers are between 18 and 25. In other words, the modal value of the age falls in the 18-25 segment, or, for example, the 13th and 85th percentiles of the age range distribution are at 18 and 25 years of age.

When you think about it, it's not as clumsy as the more technical alternatives, is it? It doesn't really matter when the concept you are trying to communicate doesn't require a high level of precision, and the majority of the readers aren't going to care anyway.

I use to do store openings for a large retailer where I had worked. 12+h days with some days nearing nearing 20h days. That's was in the US. I have often worked long shifts here in the UK too and some of my fellow developers have done insane hours.

The difference between here and china is they get paid for all their hours and people seem to care. Here it just gets shoved under the carpet and you're expected to do it out of the kindness of your heart or something like that.

So I don't feel that bad for them. Working hard and getting rewarded for it is better than signing a contract with the expectaton that you'll work long under overtime even if it's more common for them to work long hours.

You can't take an apple hater's opinion seriously because they're no better than a spoiled child and a lot of westerners are getting lazy and expect too much for nothing. That's why they have your jobs and it's not americans or brits doing paid overtime.

Re: It's not just about the wages/hours

Does it matter? After 12-20 hour shifts you want to SLEEP, not socialize.

The crewmen of most navies in the world live in more confined spaces than these workers, incidentally, especially submarine crews.

One more point: a climate controlled room with 8 bunks is a LOT better than a mud shanty farmhouse where you get eaten by bugs every night.

Those people go to FoxConn to work and take money home. If FoxConn built them bigger quarters, they would pay them less and the majority of those workers would rather have the money than a bigger room to themselves that sat empty 12 hours a day.